Alice Dunbar-Nelson
Alice Ruth Moore, aka Alice Dunbar-Nelson, was born July 19th in New Orleans Louisiana in 1875, to mixed-race parents. Beginning in the 1920s, her prolific reviews of other Harlem Renaissance writers and artists’ work earned her nationwide recognition. Through her involvement with the Harlem Renaissance artistic movement of the 1920s, Dunbar-Nelson rose to prominence as an activist writer. After graduating high school at 14, she attended a teacher-training program at Straight University, and at 17 in 1892.
She further studied at Cornell University, the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art, and the University of Pennsylvania. At a young age, Alice Moore became interested in activities that would empower Black women. In 1894, she became a charter member of the Phillis Wheatley Club in New Orleans, contributing her writing skills. She worked with the Woman's Era Club's monthly newspaper, "The Woman's Era". Targeting refined and educated women, it was the first newspaper for and created by African-American women. Alice's work with the paper marked the beginning of her career as a journalist and an activist.
In 1895, Alice Moore's first collection of short stories and poems, "Violets and Other Tales", was published by The Monthly Review. Around this time, Moore moved to Boston and then New York City. She co-founded and taught at the White Rose Mission (White Rose Home for Girls) in Manhattan's San Juan Hill neighborhood. She began a correspondence with the poet and journalist Paul Laurence Dunbar. Alice's work in The Woman's Era captured Paul Laurence Dunbar's attention.
After two years of correspondence, they met at a farewell party in Massachusetts prior to one of his trips to Europe in February of 1897. Dunbar proposed marriage to her that evening. Alice’s family did not support the engagement, and she and Dunbar eloped and married secretly in New York on March 6, 1898. For most of their married life, they lived in Washington, D.C. Alice continued to write during their marriage, publishing "The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories". This was published as a companion piece to her husband’s "Poems of Cabin and Field" in 1899. The volume helped establish her as a skillful portrayer of Creole culture.
Paul would often physically abuse Alice, which was public knowledge. She endured four years of an abusive marriage to Paul before leaving him after he assaulted her in January of 1902. Alice and Paul never divorced. After Paul's death in 1906, she continued to use his name. She then moved to Wilmington, Delaware, and taught at Howard High School for more than a decade. During the summer, Alice Dunbar taught at the State College for Colored Students (now Delaware State College).
In 1914, Alice co-founded the Equal Suffrage Study Club, and the following year she was a field organizer for the woman’s suffrage movement in the mid-Atlantic states. Alice married journalist, poet, and civil rights activist Robert J. Nelson in 1916. She joined him in becoming active in local and regional politics. They stayed together for the rest of their lives. Dunbar-Nelson supported the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP.) She served with the Women’s Commission on the Council of National Defense and the Circle of Negro War Relief during World War I.
Alice Dunbar-Nelson supported American involvement in World War I. She saw the war as a means to ending racial violence in America. Dunbar-Nelson organized events to encourage other African Americans to support the war. She referenced the war in a number of her works. In her 1918 poem "I Sit and Sew," Nelson writes from the perspective of a woman who feels suppressed from engaging directly with the war effort. Dunbar-Nelson was an activist for African Americans' and women's rights.
She was politically active, organizing for the women’s suffrage movement in the mid-Atlantic states and acting as field representative for the Woman’s Committee of the Council of Defense in 1918. She was also co-editor and writer for the A.M.E. Church Review, a church publication from 1913 to 1914. From about 1920 on, Dunbar-Nelson was a successful columnist, with her articles, essays and reviews appearing in newspapers, magazines, and academic journals. In 1920, she became the co-editor of the progressive Black newspaper, the “Wilmington Advocate.”
In that same year, she published a literary anthology, aiming at Black readers, titled “The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer.” She was a popular speaker and had an active schedule of lectures through these years. She served with well-known activist Mary Church Terrell as Recording Secretary of the National Association of Colored Women. These women strove to educate children, strengthen families, and provide social services to support Black communities in the face of racial discrimination.
In 1924, Dunbar-Nelson campaigned for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, but the Southern Democratic block in Congress defeated it. During this time, Dunbar-Nelson worked in various ways to foster political change. Dunbar-Nelson became a speaker at various events, including the 1928 American Negro Labor Congress Forum in Philadelphia. Nelson's topic was Inter-Racial Peace and its Relation to Labor. Also during that year Nelson became Executive Secretary of the American Friends Inter-Racial Peace Committee.
At 45, Dunbar-Nelson was a successful and popular writer, consistently publishing articles, columns, and essays in newspapers as well as in academic journals. Nelson is likely best known for her literary output as a poetess. She was regularly published in the "Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life", the official publication of National Urban League. Her poems were also featured in the Crisis, the NAACP publication, between 1917 and 1928. Her poems also appeared in James Weldon Johnson’s seminal anthology, "The Book of American Negro Poetry".
Dunbar-Nelson is a representative of the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Her writing is characterized by complex understandings of race, gender, and ethnicity. She wrote about her perspective of education opportunity, workplace environment, and social oppression, inspiring generations of Black writers to come. Much of Dunbar-Nelson's writing was about the color line – both White and Black color lines.
In an autobiographical piece, "Brass Ankles Speaks", she discusses the difficulties she faced growing up mixed-race in Louisiana. She recalls the isolation and the sensation of not belonging to or being accepted by either race. As a child, she said, she was called a "half white nigger" and while adults were not as vicious with their name-calling, they were also not accepting of her. Both Black and White individuals rejected her for being "too white".